Layout

There isn’t a whole lot of information that goes along with this particular photograph, but we thought it was worth mentioning. Blog mobilesguruji.co.cc has acquired the above image, showing Nokia’s unreleased and unannounced E6 smartphone. With a candybar-style layout akin to the E7x and touchscreen display, the device looks poised to replace the aging E72 in the Finnish company’s handset lineup. The report notes that the device is running a slightly modified version of Symbian with four home screens (as opposed to the standard three) and an updated icon/widget configuration. Pretty standard fare from the pre-Windows Phone Nokia… we’re interested to see what the company will be cooking up in the post-Windows Phone months to come. More →

Just a few tidbits of Facebook news to report here. Reuters is reporting that the social networking site paid a hefty $8.5 million to acquire the domain fb.com from the American Farm Bureau Federation. Last year, Facebook launched its revamped messaging service, offering its users facebook.com email address in the process. The alternate domain fb.com was purchased by the company for internal employee email addressing. The Farm Bureau now calls fb.org as its home.

In conjunction with this new messaging service, Facebook also announced a new profile layout designed to easily present and share more information with friends. For the past month, users have been able to voluntarily opt-in to the new design by visiting http://www.facebook.com/about/profile. Now, it seems as though the update will be pushed out to all users over the next several days, like it or not. More →

The genesis of Facebook continues. Yesterday, via a blog post, the social networking site announced that it would be rolling out a new, more intuitive profile page for its users. The new landing page, which houses all of your personal details, offers a new introduction, featured friends, an improved way to share favorite music, movies, books, and television shows, and better photos and friend pages. The goal of the new layout is to enable viewers of your profile to learn more about who you are and who you’re friends with in less time. For example: where you work, live, and attend(ed) school, whom you are in a relationship with, and when you were born are now prominently displayed on your profile page.

The new feature will be rolling out to all users through the end of this year, but if you are anxious to try out the new goodies, you can head to www.facebook.com/about/profile and manually enable the new style. If you take the plunge, let us know what you think. More →

Related content. When you click a Tweet, the details pane shows additional information related to the author or subject. Depending on the Tweet’s content, you may see: replies, other Tweets by that user, a map of where a geotagged Tweet was sent from, and more.

Mini profiles. Click a username to see a mini profile without navigating from the page, which provides quick access to account information, including bio and recent Tweets.

The new layout, which also provides infinite scrolling (thank you!), will be rolling out to a small percentage of users today and the vast majority of users in the next few weeks. We have a video detailing some of the functionality after the break. More →

Today, Google announced planned improvements to the contacts manager located in its Gmail web-based email client. Google touts the Contacts feature now, “works more like the rest of Gmail” and that they incorporated a ton of user feedback. Improvements include:

Keyboard shortcuts (go to Contacts and hit “?” for the full list)

Sort by last name (look under “More actions”)

Custom labels for phone numbers and other fields

The ability to undo changes you’ve just made

Automatic saving

Structured name fields, so you can adjust titles, suffixes, and other name components

A bigger, more prominent notes field

The new layout looks much cleaner and provides more functionality with fewer clicks of the mouse. Google also mentioned that they, “made it easier to get to Contacts and Tasks,” and that you’ll see links to the two in the upper left hand corner of your screen right under the Gmail logo. Hit the read link for the official Google post. Anyone seeing these updates yet? More →

Today, Google announced enhancements to their Google Images search page that aim to be: more image-oriented, accurate, and efficient. The new look brings with it the following enhancements:

Dense tiled layout designed to make it easy to look at lots of images at once. We want to get the app out of the way so you can find what you’re really looking for.

Instant scrolling between pages, without letting you get lost in the images. You can now get up to 1,000 images, all in one scrolling page. And we’ll show small, unobtrusive page numbers so you don’t lose track of where you are.

Larger thumbnail previews on the results page, designed for modern browsers and high-res screens.

A hover pane that appears when you mouse over a given thumbnail image, giving you a larger preview, more info about the image and other image-specific features such as “Similar images.”

Once you click on an image, you’re taken to a new landing page that displays a large image in context, with the website it’s hosted on visible right behind it. Click anywhere outside the image, and you’re right in the original page where you can learn more about the source and context.

Optimized keyboard navigation for faster scrolling through many pages, taking advantage of standard web keyboard shortcuts such as Page Up / Page Down. It’s all about getting you to the info you need quickly, so you can get on with actually building that treehouse or buying those flowers.

Google notes that the updates are “rolling out in most of their local interfaces worldwide over the next few days.” More →